


deadcruiser

by peaksykid



Category: Blaseball (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, Major Character Undeath, POV Second Person, Songfic, kavinsky nightcall au i guess??? this is extremely self indulgent whatever, mention of identity issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-08
Updated: 2021-01-08
Packaged: 2021-03-18 18:02:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,328
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28622244
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/peaksykid/pseuds/peaksykid
Summary: Tillman Henderson goes driving.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 5





	deadcruiser

You’ve been alone out on the road for a while before you let yourself exhale.

You haven’t driven in so long, yet you haven’t forgotten how. The little parts of it are electric, now, opening the window and sticking your arm out, swerving just a little too fast around corners, watching the streetlights make their astigmatic trails in your window glass, clutching the wheel tight. 

There’s a cassette in the old-style audio console and it’s playing a song you only half recognize, like something you heard at a party back in college, or maybe echoing from some club you’d gotten yourself kicked out of. It makes you want to go fast, and it makes you want to stop thinking about it any deeper than that.

So you listen. You focus on the fast darting yellow strip of the dividing line on the road, you focus on the light of your headlights glinting off the guardrails. You think of nothing but the movement for a good while until you stop feeling like you’re running away.

Something in you decides you are far enough out, and you relax, somewhat. It’s far enough out that you can hope beyond hoping and maybe get your hopes back that nobody will recognize you, far enough out that  _ you  _ won’t recognize any of the names they’re saying on the radio, far enough that the station from back in the city can’t reach you. 

There’s a scenic overlook up ahead, and you pull over. You slam the door of the car closed hard enough to rattle its hinges, you check your watch to make sure you haven't cracked it, and you stride out into the night. 

You came back wrong, but not wrong enough. You came back gasping for air on the concrete between the shipping containers in the seaport, saltwater dripping down your face, blood pumping faster than it flows. You came back with a cobalt in your eyes not found in nature, a glimmering just too  _ off _ to ignore, like an animal when you shine a light at it, twitchy and glassy and jumping like a fish in a net. 

But not wrong enough.

You stood in front of all thirteen of them--your team, now, apparently, whatever those words mightve meant--and they stared you through with eyes like knives, and you knew you didn’t want to stick around for any longer than you had to. You avoided their gaze, you got dressed in the bathroom instead of the locker room. You stuck it out through the last few games of the final series, you stared up in awe and in horror with everyone else as your old family got beaten to the dirt in an instant, as heaven and earth met and clashed and screamed, as the sun ripped itself in two and came back together again, and all and all and all that bullshit.

When the dust cleared, and they were all gone above somewhere, you were still there, and still wrong, and still not wrong  _ enough  _ for anyone to notice you and run. You got fed up of it pretty quickly, fed up of all these people who supposedly wanted to meet you. You tricked some guy outside the stadium into letting you “borrow” his car--at least  _ he _ was scared to bits on seeing you, so that wasn’t difficult--and you left just as the sun was going down, and started driving north, on the back roads, speeding up anytime you saw another soul.

Below the scenic overlook, waves crash against the cliff. There’s a voice in your memory and it doesn’t sound like your own, it sounds like cracking and ripping and rocks on bluffs scraping and the digging deep of metal into the warm cave of a shell. There’s a voice in your memory and she has many names but you can’t make yourself say any of them now, not here, not on these shores.

There’s a voice in your memory, and in what you remember, she tells you not to falter, but that you’re not going to like what she has to say.

In your memory, she shows you the dark, and you have no fear.

You are, fundamentally, the same person as the you that died that day. You have the same skills (in the wrong place) the same strange gait (unbalanced and unwieldy) the same wonky pitch (that gives it all away). Your hair falls over your eyes through the hole in your hat in the same way it did when you would all go to bars back home, back how it did the night you learned what was coming, in the reflection of a shop window the first time you looked at yourself and saw red before the eclipse was even overhead.

And still. Still the sea tastes different, dry in your mouth, and your nails feel harder under your skin and the carapace still cracks when you try to wash your face and there’s something inside you (it’s hard to explain) and you’re not sure whether it’s the dead part or the part from your city that is worse. Still, you look in the mirror and your reflection moves the other way. You think of your own name and you see it in symbols, [a wave crashing against a broken cliff, a grinning face hidden by shadows, a spiny sea urchin underfoot] before you see it in letters, and you don’t think to call it anything different. 

Still your heart is beating and you don’t even think to check it like she did. Still, you’re god-strange in more ways than one, twined together like a seafarer’s rope, tied into knots so tight you couldn’t tell which was from which if you tried. Still they look at you with fascination and contempt and something new, and you look right back, something lurking around in your head making them regret looking so close. They’re talking about you, but you’re still the same. 

But you’re still the same.

You get back in the car. Switch on the stereo again. Keep driving north.

There are people back there, in Charleston, who are waiting to meet you, but you don’t want to stay long. You stay up till the sunrise every night, because you forget every so often what the sun looks like--is this even the same sun, as the one you left? Of course you go, of course you wander, because your home is a thousand feet up in the air and you can’t see them anymore, can’t reach them anymore, no matter how fast you run. Because the red shell patches on your skin feel false and forgotten in a place that no longer has a name for the city you’re from. Because the body you died in burned up somewhere in San Francisco, and the new one feels wrong anytime you aren’t moving as fast as you possibly can, as fast as you’ve evolved to be. They say that evolution is nature’s way of preparing species for the environment they live in and by gods you have no idea if any of this is supposed to help you survive and she hasn’t said a word nor a whisper to explain.

So you ride with the windows down and you speak to no one. You stop in bars along the road with the collar of your jacket pulled up to the edge of your sunglasses because you figure being thought strange is better than recognition. You never take that jacket off, even to rest, out of a ghost of a superstition--people say things about jackets and you don’t want to be the one to find out whether any of them are true. All they see in the bar is a momentary blue flash in your eye that they second guess themselves about all night.

You leave; you pay the tab with your mother’s money; you drive through the night without looking back.

**Author's Note:**

> instead of reading this fic you probably could have just listened to the song. (Nightcall by Kavinsky). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MV_3Dpw-BRY   
> scorpler if you're out there this one is for u


End file.
